The end of Syria’s Baathist dictatorship?

As Syria’s civil war enters its sixth year, President Bashar al-Assad finds himself steadily gaining strength relative to the country’s disparate collection of opposition forces. Government troops continue to advance into previously rebel-held areas across the northwestern provinces, and have all but encircled the key northern metropolis of Aleppo. In the south, forces loyal to the regime regained control of the strategic crossroads town of Shaikh Miskin at the end of January. And in the far northeast, the Syrian armed forces have resumed the offensive against ISIS (so-called Islamic State), in conjunction with an assortment of Kurdish, Christian and tribal fighters.

Even so, it is unlikely that the dynamics of governance that characterized the Baath Party-dominated political-economic order that existed prior to the popular uprising in March 2011 will ever reappear. Syria’s domestic politics have changed in a half-dozen ways over the course of the civil war, and whatever type of political system emerges once the fighting comes to an end will be compelled to reflect these new realities.

First, the state’s military establishment no longer exercises anything like a monopoly of violence in Syrian society, even in those districts that are administered by the central government. The authorities in Damascus took steps relatively early in the uprising to augment the regular army with an assortment of popular militias, including the neighbourhood and village companies of the National Defence Forces, formations of Baath Party cadres known as the Baathist Battalions (Kata’ib al-Ba’th) and armed supporters of the Syrian Social National Party. In addition, during the long years of warfare, a variety of more-or-less autonomous auxiliary forces have taken shape, like the Khaibar Brigade in Homs.

Pro-regime militias increasingly share the battlefield with fighters drawn from the Lebanon-based Party of God (Hizbullah) and the Iraq-based Bands of the People of Truth (Asaib Ahl al-Haqq). The latter swelled the ranks of the Abu al-Fadl al-Abbas Brigade, which was originally tasked with guarding the pilgrimage shrine of Al-Sayyidah Zainab outside Damascus, but during 2014-5 started to carry out tactical operations alongside Hizbullah and units of the regular armed forces. After the emergence of ISIS in spring 2013, armed tribespeople in the northeastern provinces provided the core of such anti-ISIS militias as the Desert Hawks (Suqur al-Sahra) and the Eastern Lions (al-Usud al-Sharqiyya).

Moreover, brutal attacks against Syria’s linguistic and religious minorities by ISIS and the Syrian branch of Al-Qaida, the Assistance Front for the People of Syria (Jabha al-Nusra li Ahl al-Sham), prompted members of minority communities to create armed formations to protect their respective territories. Areas that are nominally under Damascus’s control are now home to the Kurdish Popular Protection Units (YPG), the Turkmens’ Sultan Murat, Sultan Selim and Seljuk Brigades, the Assyrians’ Sutoro and a handful of rival Druze battalions. Whether or not these para-state formations will agree to lay down their arms — or even subordinate themselves to a centralised command structure — once a political settlement is reached remains an open question.

Second, significant segments of Syria’s linguistic and sectarian minority communities have lost trust that the authorities in Damascus can protect them from the depredations of radical Islamists. Pervasive mistrust of the central government is most evident in predominantly Kurdish areas of the northeast, whose inhabitants have turned to an autonomous regional authority, headed by the Democratic Union Party (PYD), to take charge of day-to-day affairs. Several Turkmen and Christian districts in Al-Hasakah province have asked to be incorporated into the PYD-administered zone, in the hope that YPG fighters will take responsibility for protecting their inhabitants as well.

Not all residents of the northeast look favourably on the expansion of Kurdish political influence, however. Mid-January brought reports of growing friction between PYD officials and community activists in several Assyrian villages, which flared into sporadic rioting. At the same time, Turkmen-populated enclaves have turned to Turkey for protection, particularly around the western Kurdish canton of Afrin outside Aleppo. It seems clear that the broadly non-sectarian ethos that regulated inter-communal relations during the era of Baathist rule has now evaporated.

Third, important components of the Alawite community no longer assume that their fundamental interests are aligned with those of the political leadership in Damascus. The largely Alawite power elite that clustered around Assad after he took office in June 2000 had tenuous economic and social ties to poorer Alawites who eked out a living in the rocky coastal hills of Latakia and Tartus provinces even before the 2011 uprising. Isolated and vulnerable Alawite villages suffered severe damage as a result of being associated in the popular consciousness with the Baathist regime, and most residents ended up rallying behind the existing authorities as the fighting escalated. There is a strong possibility, however, that as soon as the war ends, disadvantaged Alawites will insist on receiving some form of compensation for the injuries that they have suffered as a consequence of their wartime loyalty. How such demands will change the distribution of power inside Syria’s Alawite community is impossible to predict.

Fourth, the regime has opened the door a bit wider to electoral competition among political parties as part of the institutional reforms it has promulgated in the years since 2011. The Baath Party no longer enjoys a constitutionally mandated advantage in parliamentary politics, and presidential elections now require more than one candidate. There is some indication that the limitations on public expression have diminished as well. In December 2015, a prominent advocate of free speech was unexpectedly released from prison, so that he could attend a conference of opposition figures in Saudi Arabia. It is of course possible that the regime will again shut down political debate after the shooting stops, as the authorities did following the abortive Damascus Spring of 2000-1. But this time the Syrian populace can be expected to take steps to resist such heavy-handed tactics.

Fifth, the cost of prosecuting the war has severely drained the resources of the central treasury. Faced with sharp reductions in revenue from agricultural and petroleum exports, state agencies have imposed a range of new taxes and fees on businesses and individuals alike. Such measures give citizens a degree of political leverage that they do not enjoy in state-run or rentier economies, where governments have streams of income that citizens cannot manipulate. Prior to the 2011 uprising, wealthy businesspeople exercised a modicum of influence in the People’s Assembly, thanks to their capacity to generate revenues and employment in an otherwise stagnant economic system. State officials’ strong incentive to placate private interests in order to rebuild Syria’s devastated economy may well augment the political clout of a broader range of domestic actors.

Finally, direct involvement in the Syrian civil war by the Russian armed forces accorded the Baathist regime a decisive advantage on the battlefield, beginning in September 2015. Yet Russian military intervention tended to undermine the position of the leadership in Damascus in the longer term. Moscow’s actions provided a clear demonstration that, left to their own devices, Assad and his colleagues are incapable of protecting Syria from the threat of radical Islamism. The president claimed at the beginning of the uprising that anyone who might be hurt by an Islamist victory had no choice but to support the Baathist order. The regime’s need to be rescued by Russian air strikes belies that claim, and weakened what little was left of the legitimacy of Baath Party rule.

No matter what sort of institutional arrangements result from negotiations between opposition and government representatives in Geneva, the Baathist dictatorship that governed Syria for five decades after the 1963 revolution cannot be restored. Six long years of barbarity have not only devastated the country’s economy, social mosaic and architectural heritage, they have pulverised the foundations of authoritarian rule. The underlying structure of Syrian politics will have to be rebuilt from scratch.

Fred H Lawson

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Fred H Lawson is professor of government at Mills College in Oakland, California. He is author of Global Security Watch Syria, Praeger, 2013. and editor of Demystifying Syria, Saqi Books, 2009.